Amazon Web Services now offers a new medium instance of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services, according to an AWS blog post. That brings the total number of EC2 instances to 13 — for now. The company also said users can now launch 64-bit operating systems from that new “m1.medium” instance as well as from an existing smaller (“m1.small”) medium instance.
Instance sizes are defined by memory, core type, storage and I/O performance, so developers choose the type they need for their workload.
With this latest addition, AWS continues to add options across its compute and storage services in a bid to get as many people on its cloud as possible. On Monday it cut prices on several existing EC2 services.
Specs for the new m1 instance are:
- 3.75 GB of RAM
- 1 virtual core running at 2 ECU (EC2 Compute Unit)
- 410 GB of instance storage
- 32- and 64-bit
- Moderate I/O performance
The full list of EC2 instance types is here.
As for the 64-bit OS support, AWS evangelist Jeff Barr blogged:
You can now launch 64-bit operating systems on the Small and Medium instance types. This means that you can now create a single Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and run it on an extremely wide range of instance types, from the Micro all the way up to the High-CPU Extra Large and and [sic] the High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large.
Amazon also said it has integrated the MindTerm SSH (secure shell) client to the AWS management console so users can log into their services dashboard from a secure client.
As we have reported before, AWS rolls out new and tweaked services seemingly around the clock. And when it is not bringing them out, it is cutting prices on what it already offers. The moves come as an array of competitors are lining up OpenStack-based infrastructure service alternatives that they hope will give AWS — the market leader — a run for its money.
Elsewhere on the competitive front, Microsoft’s Windows Azure, while technically a Platform-as-a-Service offering, is seen as a long-term rival to AWS as well. Azure is still beta testing Infrastructure-as-a-Service options such as VM Roles, which compete with aspects of EC2. The problem is that Microsoft has had these options in test mode for more than a year while Amazon keeps churning out new options.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user A Man of Wealth and Taste
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